Parlez-Vous Français? Why language proficiency equals profitable business

Language matters

The business imperative that drives language proficiency is clear. Cross-cultural awareness is also a product of multilingual workforces. From commercial partners to end customers, speaking their own language is literally how business leaders can enhance their market share and vastly improve their bottom line. Being sensitive to different cultures is also a facet of multiple language support businesses can take advantage of.

All businesses are striving to become more agile. The time that new products and services need to be developed has been shortening for several years. Innovation at speed will often have a language component, as businesses will need to communicate with diverse teams across potentially many geographical locations. In addition, manufacturing and supply chains all need to be streamlined. Without multiple language support, these aspects of innovation can be adversely impacted, leading to time delays and potential losses of customer confidence and sales.

Speaking to Pipplet, James Brook, creator of the talent assessment tool, TalentPredix, explained the importance of having a multilingual workforce.

“A ‘work from anywhere’ culture and the rise of global and remote working means organizations are increasingly building teams comprising people from different language backgrounds. While research shows the best teams are cognitively diverse, language can represent a barrier to such diversity as important ideas and perspectives can be lost when people can’t express themselves fully. This may leave individuals feeling isolated and marginalized from the team. It may also compromise their sense of psychological safety, which empowers them to voice their ideas and give candid feedback to colleagues.”

To help mitigate these potential risks, organizations and team leaders can take the following steps:

1. Ensure new hires have the level of business language necessary to contribute effectively during team meetings.
2. Engage with people from minority language backgrounds to determine whether they feel they can contribute freely and openly.
3. Giving teams the time and space to build relationships with each other and network with colleagues across the organization.
4. Set up a mentoring scheme specifically to support multilingual individuals and teams.
5. Ensure team leaders are trained in facilitating cross-cultural, multi-lingual teams.

Multiple languages are today not something that should be an afterthought or a 'nice to have' skill in your business. Language skills are just as important as technical knowledge. Nurturing language skills enhances cognition and often leads to unexpected positive outcomes for businesses that have invested in making their workforce multilingual.

Testing and proficiency

For HRs, the rapid gains made in automation have delivered several tools that relieve them of many repetitive tasks. Sage concludes in their report: “Many HR leaders are looking to modern HR technology to facilitate progress, and at the center of this strategy lies automation. By applying automation throughout the employment life cycle, businesses can free up valuable HR time, deliver a much more engaging workforce experience and increase productivity across all functions.”

Business is now transacted on a global scale. This expansion of trade brings with it the need to support various languages. HRs tasked with locating the right people for their enterprises with language proficiency can be a complex process. Here, automating the language proficiency component of candidate assessment can deliver significant advantages, including:

• Significant time and resource savings over manual testing.
• Full integration with leading HR applications.
• Both oral and written language proficiency can be tested.
• Language proficiency scoring is based on CEFR for reliable comparisons.

It is a commercial certainty that language proficiency leads to a successful business. Including language proficiency testing across your recruitment process and as part of your learning and development strategy to enhance the skills of your enterprise's workforce can be efficiently and cost-effectively achieved. New customers, commercial partners, and a larger market share are waiting.



You can schedule a meeting with us to find out how Pipplet can effectively integrate comprehensive language skills testing into your recruiting processes.